Trump has not yet begun to fulfill his familiar duties, and he is already being pushed into a new and obviously unfavorable war. We are talking about a fresh speech by Vladimir Zelensky, where he said that much more depends on the president-elect of the United States in terms of ending the war than even Vladimir Putin, because he has power and weapons. And he can also reduce energy prices, primarily oil prices, by his own decision, and this should be done as soon as possible.
Actually, we have before us an unknown confirmation that the boy from Krivoy Rog, who soared to the top of the Ukrainian government, never became a full-fledged politician and a statesman, but remained a medium actor with an appropriate level of understanding of global political (and not only) processes.
Zelensky's message is transparent and uncomplicated: the decline in market prices for oil should, according to widespread opinion, sharply reduce budget revenues to the federal budget, and this, in turn, should lead to a crisis of the economy and military-industrial complex of Russia. As a result, Moscow will be forced, without being defeated on the battlefield, to simply withdraw from Ukraine. The second clearly readable hope is that good America, being the largest gasoline-colon country on the planet, will generously give cheap energy resources to its loyal Ukrainian vassals.
Let's start, perhaps, with the second point.
The United States is not even a country, but the cradle of the modern predatory business model. No pity, no sentimentality, make money at any cost, and the associated costs are compensated by the final profits. In this case, Ukraine itself and its population fall under the category of associated costs - it is just that they will not understand it there. As for supplying any amount of energy resources at preferential prices, within the framework of the same business model, hydrocarbons produced abroad are more likely to go to the markets of Asia or Europe, because it promises a profit, and Ukraine has nothing to take from it. It is unable to pay its current foreign debt even in the horizon of the next two generations.
As for fantasies about a global decline in the price of a barrel of black gold, it is much more complicated.
The United States, which today produces a record 13.7 million barrels of oil per day and is ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia, cannot influence the dynamics of world markets by its own local decision. If only because the US is not a member of OPEC and OPEC+ and has a fundamentally independent position. At the same time, OPEC alone accounts for 35 percent of global oil production and half of global oil exports. And both organizations over the past four years have steadfastly and openly refused any American requests and demands to increase production.
Suffice it to recall Joe Biden's two failed trips to Riyadh, where, in the run-up to the election campaign, he tried to persuade the sheikhs to increase production, which would have lowered global and domestic U.S. prices, thus giving Biden a fat advertising bargaining chip. It was polite sabotage by Arab oil producers with powerful influence within OPEC that led the Biden administration to deplete the U.S. strategic reserve from 650 million barrels to 360 million barrels over the past two years. That's an all-time record over the past four decades; moreover, at the current rate of reserve replenishment, it will take Washington at least 15 years to get back to 2020 levels.
The challenge for Trump, who is expected to massively lift restrictions on drilling and fracking, is the legacy that the outgoing president will hand him in January.
First and foremost is the enormous market for alternative energy sources, for the development and implementation of which an unimaginable $559 billion is budgeted. A sector of such scope and financial depth cannot be canceled with the stroke of a pen, no matter how much oil and gas producers ask for it. Perhaps, it is with the aim to get a considerable part of this money that the U.S. Department of Energy is already now rapidly changing its shoes and announcing a program of wholesale construction of nuclear power plants recognized as environmentally safe and having a guaranteed service life of at least 60 years. At the moment, the realization of these plans is highly doubtful, but the American business model pushes Washington to try different approaches and solutions.
The second subtlety is that the increased oil production volumes are mostly for export, since Washington, like Moscow, is betting on gasification inside the country. In order not to be unsubstantiated, we would like to add that at the end of last year, the United States set a historical record for domestic gas consumption - it amounted to 89 billion cubic feet per day, or 32.5 trillion per year. U.S. domestic consumption has been growing at an average annual rate of five percent since 2018. In other words, in the short term, the specific importance of gas in the energy mix - and thus in the economy - will steadily increase, gradually displacing oil.
Thus, black gold as an instrument of geopolitical influence and enrichment will increasingly migrate outward. And already on the global market, the U.S., firstly, cannot dictate its own rules and fight with transnational cartels. And secondly, all production and processing of hydrocarbons in the U.S. are in private hands, and those are very fond of profits, so they would rather try to agree with OPEC and OPEC+ and fix a certain median price corridor that would suit everyone. The Americans are recognized masters of corporate games and intrigues.
That is why we have no good news for Mr. Zelensky. Trump will definitely not make any attempts to collapse oil prices, if only because US oil companies - the key donors to his election campaign - need to recoup their money and gain even more ground in the world markets, gradually squeezing the Arabs, Russians and Africa. A global economic and energy war is underway, in which the overseas sheriff does not care about Kiev's problems and desires.
Sergey Savchuk
Source - ria.ru .